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PyData Southampton News, September 2025¶

18th Meetup, hosted by Carnival UK¶

@PyDataSoton¶

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PyData Code of Conduct¶

https://pydata.org/code-of-conduct/¶

NumFOCUS¶

  • US-based charity in support of open-source scientific computing
  • Financial and admin support for many open-source projects
  • Support for many community events
  • https://numfocus.org

PyData¶

  • Educational program by NumFOCUS
  • A global community
  • 129 groups across 54 countries world-wide
  • 203,484+ users world-wide (+23,000 per year!)
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PyData Southampton¶

  • 654 members (~25 per month! Tell a friend! Submit a talk! Always need a ⚡)

  • Monthly meetup

  • All run by volunteers

  • Propose a Talk: https://bit.ly/pydataSoton-talks

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  1. The operating company for P&O Cruises & Cunard; no one knows cruising like Carnival UK!
  2. Sponsors PyData Southampton ❤️❤️❤️

Upcoming Conferences¶

Courtesy of https://pythondeadlin.es/¶

🇬🇧 September 19-22 2025 - PyCon UK 2025 🚨 CFP closed 🚨¶

🇳🇱 September 24-26 2025 - PyData Amsterdam 2025 🚨 CFP closed 🚨¶

🇫🇷 September 30-01 October 2025 - PyData Paris 2025 🚨 CFP closed 🚨¶

Tonight's Schedule¶

18:30 Doors open¶

19:00 Talks start ⬅️ YOU ARE HERE¶

19:15 Talk #1 + Q&A¶

19:45 Break 🥂¶

20:00 Talk #2 + Q&A¶

20:30 ⚡ Lightning Talks ⚡ + 📣 Community Announcements 📣¶

20:45 to 21:00 We're done 🔜 All Bar One 🍻¶

1️⃣ The companies we keep: Shining a light on UK Corporate Ownership - Adam Hill¶

In June 2016 the UK government launched the world’s first “beneficial ownership” register; a requirement for all UK companies to register who were the “persons of significant control”, PSCs, who actually controlled the company. Recent investigative journalism has made headlines with the leaking of the Panama and Paradise papers and it is clear that transparency in corporate ownership needs to be a significant factor within modern democracy. In a partnership between DataKind UK and Global Witness we have built the worlds first network graph mapping all of the UK public data on those who control corporate interests in the UK; it comprises in excess of 4.5 million companies and 4 million individual people. It has been enriched with company officer data and metrics of financial secrecy based upon geographic regions.

The goal of the project was to enable Global Witness to search for "shady patterns" within corporate ownership networks to act as leads for investigative journalism to expose corrupt practices. Further more, we were able to analyse the completeness of the register and identify ways of improving such data structures to inform other world governments how to best build similar public registers of corporate ownership.

We present here how we built this amazing data structure using Python tools for cleaning and data processing and a Neo4j graph database storing the network graph itself. In addition, we share the first insights derived from this process.

2️⃣ Breaking the Black Box - How to Evaluate Your Agents... in Real Time Too! - Craig West¶

If you are building with LLMs, creating high quality evaluations is one of the most impactful things you can do. Without evals, it can be very difficult and time intensive to understand how different model versions might affect your use case. This talk aims to provide you a roadmap that may be simpler than you think to implement.

In this talk, we will look at the two aspects of Observability and Evaluation. Using the manual evaluating-ai-agents.com, along with its code repo, we will see that observability can be done without vendor solutions but with standard Python, either during Evaluation Driven Development or after development.

We will look at three core evaluation strategies - deterministic, human and LLM as Judge - with code examples.

⚡ Lightning Talks ⚡¶

⚡1️⃣ Last minute opportunity ...¶

⚡2️⃣ Last minute opportunity ...¶

🕊️ BlueSky/Thread #pydatasoton and @pydatasoton 🦆¶